The Commitments
Seven ways a litigation firm stops printing
Most of the legal industry’s sustainability problem is an outdated business model rather than a hard constraint — paper files, printed motions, and a courthouse appearance for a five-minute hearing. These are the commitments we have made instead.
- 01
No single-use plastics
Habitual use of single-use plastics has been eliminated from the office — no bottled water, no disposable cups, no plastic cutlery in the kitchen.
- 02
A paperless case file
An online, cloud-based documentation and case management system, which removes the need for a printed file to exist at all.
- 03
Correspondence by text
A text-based client programme that substantially decreases the amount of printed correspondence leaving the office.
- 04
Work from home
Transportation accounts for 29% of U.S. emissions. A work-from-home policy is the largest single reduction available to a firm of this size.
- 05
Remote hearings
Remote hearings requested on every out-of-county matter the court will allow, cutting the same mobility-linked footprint further.
- 06
Motions served electronically
As a firm that spends countless hours in the courtroom, we offer opposing parties electronic service rather than printed copies — thousands of pages a year.
- 07
Research bought as e-books
All legal research, statutes and primers purchased in e-book format rather than print. A practice library is the one set of paper in a law office that gets reprinted every year whether or not anything in it has changed.
Why It Matters
The same principle runs through how we work
Less paper and fewer miles is not a separate initiative bolted onto the practice. It is the same argument as being selective about cases: a firm that does not need volume does not need the overheads volume brings.
A litigation practice’s footprint is paper and driving. A single contested case can generate a banker’s box of printed discovery, and a docket spread across the Metroplex and the counties around it can put a lawyer on the road several days a week. Neither is required by the law. Both are habits held over from the years before the courts took electronic filing.
A courthouse appearance for a five-minute hearing is a business-model problem, not a legal requirement.
Of the two, the driving is the larger by some distance — it is the 29% above — so the two commitments that cut miles do more work here than the five that cut paper. They are also the two the firm feels directly.
